Civil Defense (DS9)

[J!!]

I do remember one episode O'Brien described the ridiculous hacks he had to do to get the Cardassian equipment to play nice with Federation software, and one of the cardassians (Garak or Dukat, don't recall which) was aghast at the kind of butchery he was performing

Are you sure you're not thinking of the female Cardassian scientist who thought he was hitting on her because of all the bickering they were doing; iirc she expressed frustration at the ludicrous number of backups and redundancies Federation protocol demanded.

if i'm not mistaken, one of the changes she complained about was that starfleet foolishly decided to make all the force-fields nonlethal. bet they're glad they did that in this episode.

They didn't wipe the station's computers before taking the place over? Or maybe they shoulda just installed new computers, nice, friendly Federation computers, computers that don't replicate phasers and start blasting people.

so, either write completely new software for an entirely alien computer system, or try to make thousands of pieces of cardassian hardware work with federaton computers. and that's hoping there isn't some other special surprise set up for just such a situation

it's actually rather impressive that nothing like this has happened before, it took messing around in the file-system of a computer that probably hasn't even been turned on in years. of course after this, i bet sisko has o'brian spending all his off-screen time for the next eight months going over every system on the station with a fine-tooth comb.


other thoughts

i love that dukat took the time to record that message, just for the people who were about to be gassed to death, like he actually thought it would be some sort of comfort.

they could've had the system set up to allow free passage for cardassians. except when garak trys, he walks right into a force-field, activating a message from dukat explaining that he had the system make an exception, because he personally hates garak just that much. i think it would've been a good gag, and made the payoff when dukat's own superiors did that to him all the better.

how useful would some of those phaser sentry-guns have been, like a thousand other times in every single star trek show?

also, the janitor was misinformed; bob dylan won the nobel prize in literature, not peace.

[Durandal_1707]

also, the janitor was misinformed; bob dylan won the nobel prize in literature, not peace.

And why not? You can win a Nobel for writing poetry, and a lot of Dylan's lyrics would certainly qualify as such.

[J!!]

hey, take it up with coma-guy, not me

[MadAmosMalone]

so, either write completely new software for an entirely alien computer system, or try to make thousands of pieces of cardassian hardware work with federaton computers. and that's hoping there isn't some other special surprise set up for just such a situation

Why not? In a society that has matter replication, teleportation and FTL all commonplace, they would likely have a purpose-built AI that could write operating systems for all kinds of alien hardware. After all, they have universal translation for spoken languages so it shouldn't be a tall order to communicate with alien machines.

[J!!]

what they are able to do with their technology is a completely separate thing from what they should be able to do with it, and completely in the hands of the writers.

if they could, they probably would've, so since they didn't, they probably can't.

[Dînadan]

they could've had the system set up to allow free passage for cardassians. except when garak trys, he walks right into a force-field, activating a message from dukat explaining that he had the system make an exception, because he personally hates garak just that much. i think it would've been a good gag, and made the payoff when dukat's own superiors did that to him all the better.

While that would have been a good gag, I can think of two potential problems with it; 1) did Dukat know Garak was going to be left behind on the station? Especially considering those messages were likely recorded back when the station first went online. 2) Garak was probably using some sort of super-secret Obsidian Order Command code which would probably have trumped Dukat's programme in that regard.

[TheNewTeddy]

I really think chuck missed an opportunity to comment on DuKat being 'one of the gang' in the scenes with him working on his hands and knees on the inside guts of some panel

[drthmik]

To be honest I always just assumed that in order to replace the Cardassian Computers they would have had to rebuild the Whole station from scratch because computers are integrated into literally EVERY surface!
And they couldn't just delete the OS because the Physical computer can't support a Federation OS
Kinda Like Macs back in the Power PC days
the hardware itself is incompatible

[Rasp]

To be honest I always just assumed that in order to replace the Cardassian Computers they would have had to rebuild the Whole station from scratch because computers are integrated into literally EVERY surface!
And they couldn't just delete the OS because the Physical computer can't support a Federation OS
Kinda Like Macs back in the Power PC days
the hardware itself is incompatible

they would have had to replace all the stations systems or write entirely new OS and drivers for every device and then troubleshoot each - including life support and artificial gravity - at that stage why not just BUILD a whole new federation outpost if you're going to go through that much effort? And assuming they DID have an AI's that could troubleshoot problems like that - Why would science and engineering teams not be consulting with these things constantly? Wouldn't it be churning out the technobabble solution of the week most of the time rather than the meatbag crewman?

Although considering the staunch federation diplomacy stance at this time- I'm sure the top federation officials threw that idea out immediately - don't wanna provoke the evil oppressors or anything do we? Bloody federation.....

[Dînadan]

I doubt the Federation had much say in the matter; they were contracted by the Orovisional Government to manage that specific station, so pissing off the Cardassians wouldn't have factored into it. And it's not as if they could force the Bajorans to let them build a station for them when a) there was already a perfectly good station there and b) the Bajorans probably thought there was something symbolic about repurposing one of the main symbols of their oppression.